These restrictions on literature are restrictions on truth. They’re reminders of the stipulations set in place when it comes to “whose truth” we amplify, teach, and give life to. The attempt to ban books is an attempt to erase the stories in them. But what can’t be erased are the people who hold these stories.
My cousin left this message for me three months into my freshman year of college. His Chicago accent was so thick that I had to replay it a few times: Aye cuz, answer yo phone, he said. I talked to my mom, she told me you are out there doing yo thang. We were kids walking through Hyde Park, dreaming about everything we wanted to do, and you down there making it happen. I’m really proud of you cuz. I love you cuz, stay true to yourself. You’re my motivation.
Voice mail has gotten a bad rep. Antiquated and annoying, it can easily be ignored and take up too much phone storage and is a hassle if you happen to have a long-winded relative; most of us have all but abandoned it in favor of more instantaneous connections. But I did not realize what a trove my inbox had become until that day.
Sandra Lim's third book, The Curious Thing (W.W. Norton), is a continuation of her usual interests — eros and philosophy, surprising imagery and associative leaps — but most striking about this new collection is the insistence on a contemporary feminine interiority which Lim declares, poem after poem, as the source of the lyric itself.
The book is a puzzle. The greatest joy in it comes from watching the pieces snap into place. It is an epic of the quietest kind, whispering across 600 years in a voice no louder than a librarian's. It is a book about books, a story about stories. It is tragedy and comedy and myth and fable and a warning and a comfort all at the same time. It says, Life is hard. Everyone believes the world is ending all the time. But so far, all of them have been wrong.
It says that if stories can survive, maybe we can, too.
Real people are tricky puzzles, volatile blends of self-knowledge and blindness, full of inexhaustible surprises and contradictions. Literary characters seldom achieve a comparably unpredictable intricacy because they are, after all, artifacts made by equally blinkered human beings, and furthermore they are the means to an artistic end. Franzen hasn’t always given his readers characters as persuasively flawed as the Hildebrandts. He hasn’t always tried to. But in Crossroads, his satirical and didactic impulses largely in check, his touch gentled, Franzen has created characters of almost uncanny authenticity. Is there anything more a great novelist ought to do? I didn’t think so.
And yet here’s the novel itself, and it’s a mellow, marzipan-hued ’70s-era heartbreaker. “Crossroads” is warmer than anything he’s yet written, wider in its human sympathies, weightier of image and intellect. If I missed some of the acid of his earlier novels, well, this one has powerful compensations.
With its punctuationless title, “Lean Fall Stand” is a book about the slipperiness of language, that flexible and fallible vehicle for consciousness and communication on which we are so dependent. Even among those in the novel who have not suffered strokes, language at times is incommensurate with the job it is expected to perform. “I’m sorry. My thinking is pre-empted by my speaking,” a character says to Anna. Later, while drinking tea with her daughter, the conversation dries up. “Neither of them knew what to say, or how to say it.”
Some books linger long after their conclusion. So it is with “Rites: Stories,” the debut collection by Choctaw author Savannah Johnston. Centering the Indigenous peoples of rural Oklahoma, “Rites” is a master class on compression. Johnston portrays the aching, farcical nature of existence in just a few pages.